Fooling futility

This poem is basically displacement activity.
     What I should be doing is getting stuck into my final piece of work for my Open University degree because, goodness knows, I have notes, references and books all over the place all related to my chosen painting which is the focus for the writing.  But . . . 
     True to my dilatory self I have found hundreds of things to do rather than start the hard slog of getting a draft done.  As a wise person once said, "The most important thing about a draft is, that it exists!"  Once it is there, then the easier tinkering can take place.
     I tell myself that part of my inactivity is my inability to locate a particularly useful (although in French) article that is specifically related to my painting.  I have tried everything, up to and including a late night electronic conversation with the night-librarian (such things exist) on the Open University web site!  Nothing.  So I sit and sulk, and find other things to do.
     One of those 'other things' is write poems.  This one was a result of 'mining' the notebook, in other words looking back at notes about which I half remember thinking might have made a decent poem.
     The inspiration for this poem came just as I went to bed, so I turned the light on, scrabbled around for a pencil and scribbled a few lines in my notebook.
     With the recent death of an aunt, I am getting more and more aware that a whole area of shared experience and history is being lost - a concept that I have explored in a number of poems.
     The knowledge that I was particularly conscious of loosing was of myself.  I reasoned that my uncles and aunts all saw and knew me when I was a tiny baby: they knew me far better than I could possibly know myself.  That idea bumped around in my head and I began to think about when I realised that I was me, so to speak.
     I think that there must have been a memory of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead in the back of my mind, when one of the characters talks about realisation, I think it was of death and wonders why the first understanding of mortality was not an astounding event.
     Anyway, this is the poem that came out of that late night scribble.

Fooling futility

          a time

(that could return)

when I was just a

crying thing:

milk-sucking, nappy-soiler;

unaware I was alive –

though lustily around.

When do we realise that

we exist? 

            It ought to be

momentous!

Causing us to grab mortality before

it clutches us, and lets us

sink past skinny fingers

to the pyramidal pile of dust

the wrong end of the glass.

                       But, there again,

perhaps we don’t. 

                       Exist, that is.

‘Tho not quite sure how that might work,

I must admit I’m quite impressed

at the illusion I’ve made up

to fill the gap after

there was

The ambiguity of the title is intentional with 'fooling' working either as an adjective or a verb.

This is another of my poems where the lack of punctuation at the beginning and end is also intentional and part of the intended meaning.

Having a small notebook improves your eyesight.  True!  When you force yourself to write something, anything - then you look around with greater attention.  Or, at least I like to think so.  Whenever you write (or at least, whenever I write) there is a nagging devil's advocate voice asking if anything of what you are writing is worthwhile.

     It is an odd thing, I do admit that.  I sit, each day after my obligatory cup of tea and write something in my little (yellow at the moment) notebook.  No one else is doing this, only me.  It does make me think!

     When I was in Cardiff ,a friend asked if all my poetry writing was "just self-indulgence" - I replied (almost) instantly that it was something that I needed to do.  Which, now I think of it, is not really a refutation of the criticism implied in his words.

     Probably the self-questioning about my writing will continue as long as I write, and will probably be a chunk of the subject matter as well.

     There is an element of irony in the title, because, after all, I am doing nothing more than moving a pen around a page and looking at my surroundings with the arrogance of someone who samples what he sees and uses it for what he hopes is a piece of writing which has an element of the "observational acuity" mentioned in the poem!  Well, you judge!

Action

Summer struggles to emerge

from hazy skies, and tries to

counter cooling drafts; it’s

almost there, but sitting ‘out’

is still a gesture rather than delight.

I’m the only one in shorts.

And sitting by myself.

Am I involved?

The curl of other people’s smoke

pricks through my space.  The kids

run-stitch the patchwork tables

into tapestry.  A single voice strand

wraps with other talk:

the hubbub weft that threads the

warp lines of the soft-crunched, stony earth

beneath the rolling needle-drag of metal boule.

And is all this the

observational acuity

I like to think,

or just an action for my pen

to hide a truth?

I am still working on the poems that will make up the sequence called, The Visit, which I hope to publish as a chapbook.  At least the cover is done, now all I have to do is write the introduction!  Work progresses!

Truth

An intimidating title, than only an arrogant fool would attempt to match with a poem!  I don't think that I am either a fool (most of the time) or arrogant (some of the time) or at least, when I think about it I try not to be.

     This poem grew from the sort of limited free-write that I do after my swim, while I am waiting for my special blend tea to brew.  Sometimes the things that I write are no more than banalities, but sometimes something grows from the ordinary words and simple observations.

     I feel it might be a sort of repressed sexism in me, but I hate seeing women smoke.  I don't like seeing anyone smoke, but women, especially young women, bring out more of a sense of disgust than I can account for.

     I have, of course, tried to account for it and I have rationalised it to "a detail of the natural nurturing aspect of maternity and a rooted objection to the perceived 'aping' of the more masculine role of aggressive smoker" - but I think that it comes down, more simply, to a memory of my mother smoking.

     I can say that my mother smoked, but, in my imagination I find it impossible to picture her putting a cigarette into her mouth and lighting up.  But she did smoke throughout my childhood, only giving up each Lent and then starting again on Easter Sunday!  She did eventually and finally give up, succumbing to my constant pleading.  But it didn't save her.  Which may also explain my loathing of the habit.

     So it was watching a young woman smoke, and smoke 'professionally' with that casual dexterity that irritates so much, that provoked the memory of my mother and then seeing my mother in my memory wearing the dress described in the beginning of the poem.

     This description develops into a sort of free association of remembered aspects of my early childhood and ends with the realisation that justifies the title.

     The last three lines are deeply felt.

Truth

When mum enters my mind

(as she so often does)

she’s always dressed

in that one dress. 

The black and white,

with floral print, with

puffed-out sleeves, and

with a texture: Crimplene?

I might be wrong.

It was a summer dress:

of Dogfield Street;

of Dando and Ducu;

of Gladstone Primary School;

of graveyard walking with my Gramp;

of singing in the choir with my own

surplice on a vestry peg;

of the Carnegie Library and its books;

of my first named a/c in Tewkesbury Street PO;

of Penny when a pup on Pendine Sands;

of sight unglazed and broken bones, cut chin;

of crew-cuts and of corner shops;

of Bon Mini and black Ford, second hand;

of running boards,

           

            with mum, athletic, still,

            but always with bad back

            and blood not right.

And knowing that I knew

two people who

would die for me,

without a second’s thought.

Reality, I’ve nursed

throughout my life.

A never-given gift.

And one that never

can be taken back.

In the same way that I believed that every city had a large park with a boating lake with islands in it and old arcades with interesting shops, just because Cardiff did, I also believed that everyone's experience of family was like mine.  It came as a shock, as I grew older and friends confided in me, that their parents did not always behave in the way that mine did.  Most people have loving parents, but I know that this is not always true.  The poem is a sort of recognition of the "knowing that I knew", the certainty of unconditional love.

After the funeral of my Aunt in Wales, I visited my last remaining relative of my father and mother's generation: the last of my uncles and aunts.  Who, importantly, is a person in her own right and not just a symbol of some sort.  But I do feel a gathering sense of loss as, perfectly naturally, but unforgivably these people who were part of my growing up and continuing life, cease to be.

     The words that end the first stanza, came out of the blue and gave me pause for thought.

     They stayed with me when I left my aunt and I have been thinking about them ever since.  The poem that I have written formed itself around those words, and I used odd sheets of paper that I found in the hotel where I was staying to write out some of my drafts.  Most of the work on the poem was done on my portable computer and I now feel that the work is ready to be posted.

     I am still unsettled by my aunt's sudden pronouncement and I have tried, in the poem to give a sense of what I felt and what I have been thinking about since.

My Last Aunt

Who else is there

who cares enough,

was close enough,

to match realities and say,

“You have your father’s hands”?

Five words that spring

pain-pleasured thoughts

– the double edge of memory –

whose cut’s self-healing,

because remembering’s

the only truth

that’s left. 

And knowing, too,

such observation’s limited

to just one fragile life:

the final representative of

those who’ve gone before.

She holds a telling knowledge.

From

            existences,

both mine and his,

she draws the parallels,

as sequences work out,

or not. 

Her collaged times

are fragments of the present-past:

the incongruities

that shape a life.

I do feel that this poem picks up on themes that have been concerning me recently connected to ageing, death and memory.

After his trip to the Far East, when he talked to lots of people and engaged them in interesting conversations about their lives, those same people were horrified to find that the pleasant gentleman with whom they had had a chinwag had used their accounts as the basis for a very successful series of revealing short stories.  Perhaps, when the short stories are of such quality as those that Somerset Maugham wrote, it is possible to forgive his cavalier use of confidence!
     In other words, there are some writers who see the world passing before their eyes as an unending offering of more and more material for them to use.  Which I suppose is fine, until the nearest and dearest of the writer find themselves transmogrified (but still recognisable) as the basis for some literary treat.
     Which is my way of saying that I have written a poem about going to my aunt's funeral.  Which is the day after tomorrow.
     A fair number of my recent poems have been about time, memory and age and, as I am now of retirement age (at least the retirement age for my generation!) it is hardly surprising that thoughts turn to mortality, especially when death comes to a relative.
     Of my uncles and aunts, now only one remains alive.  I know that it is a natural and inevitable process, but that doesn't make it any the less unsettling.
     My aunt had reached what is generally described as a 'good age' and therefore, the funeral should be more of a celebration of a life than grieving for a life gone.  Sadness is inevitable, but . . . and I suppose at this point you can write in any cliché about life 'continuing' that you want to.  My response is this poem.

I found that what I wanted to say formed itself into an unrhymed sonnet-like poem.  
     I wanted, in the content, to combine the practical with the theoretical.  So the poem opens with the ordinary considerations that such an occasion demands, and leads on to turning the funereal eye towards the next generation in line.  
     A form of practicality links the opening and closing of the poem, by thinking about two different forms of preparation: sartorial and funereal.

Attending the Funeral of an Agèd Aunt

Cupboard-stale and double-cuffed, white shirts;

all-purpose suit that doesn’t really fit; 

the rummaging for ‘nice-but-sombre’ tie;

recalcitrant belongings, badly packed:

it’s what a funeral’s become for me.

As relative-stacked generations die away,

the knowledge that we’re next in line

is inescapable.  

                        We’ve been protected

from the wars 

                        that made our parents

(and made theirs) accept a choice.

No bullets (probably) will stop our lives.

A long, drawn-out and under-funded death

will be technology and politics’ life-gift:

an irony, that mocks our lack of choice.

I am also working on a linked group of three poems called 'The Visit'.  I have written a draft (so are they all drafts!) of the first poem and I hope to write the other two over the next couple of weeks.  when I have something I will post it for consideration.

You might also like to dip into my blog which stretches back to 2006.  there are not as many entries as there were in the early days, but I am resolving to write more and write more often.

The blog is: cardifftocatalonia.blogspot.com.es

Any comments will be welcome!